Updated Audible Client for Blackberry

I have been using the Audible client on my Blackberry Storm for the last several months and it has been nice to listen to something more productive than music on my ride to work and during my workout. In case you do not know what Audible is and are to lazy to click the link, it is a audio book site that has its own client software to assuage publishers fears that the books will end up on torrent sites. They are trivially easy to convert to regular MP3s, but it is time consuming. Generally the client is useful though, so I just keep mine in the native format and use their client. Another advantage of paying for the service is an subscription to an audio version on the New York Times or Wall Street Journal. I personally listen to the WSJ on my way to work for right wing propaganda and balance it out with left wing propaganda from NPR when I get to the office. I listen to audio books while I work out so I am expanding my mind while shrinking my gut, or at least that is the idea. It at least keeps me from dying of boredom while doing cardio.

The blackberry client was really flaky though. It lost my place in books, which is a bit of a pain when each file can be up to 8 hours long. It would fail to connect so I could not get my WSJ stream in the morning. It would randomly stop mid stream on the WSJ. It would also have long pauses for no apparent reason. It used about 10 times the battery of the regular media player and would occasionally not shut down leading to a dead battery in a couple hours unless you hard rebooted the phone.

Earlier this week I downloaded the newest upgrade to the Audible client and have been impressed. It has connected every time since the upgrade. The WSJ feed has been much more consistent with no pauses between sections. And it has not lost my place in "The Blank Slate", my current gym book, even in the upgrade process. It has shut down and started up faster and more consistently since the upgrade also. It seems to use a little less battery, but I can't say by how much. Overall, I think it was a much needed upgrade that makes the service much more usable.

How to kill a hard drive

A couple days ago I started running into problems with video editing and DVD burning that I had not seen before. On further investigating I noticed the hard drives were pegged at 100% all the time. This was new, so I did the normal investigation of running processes and services to see what was thrashing. I do have to say the Resource Monitor Microsoft added in Vista is handy. I noticed one of the svchost services was reading a bunch of the 4GB video files all the time.
After a little investigation I figured out why. Vista added an updated pre-caching service called Superfetch. Normally this service looks at the files you use often and moves them to memory. As I found out from reading up on it at PCStats and OCModShop. Normally this only causes problems on systems with 2GB or less of RAM, but even 12GB gets full quickly when you are loading a bunch of 4GB files.
The problem was that my friend and wife had both been doing a ton of video editing lately, so Superfetch decided it needed to have all the raw footage and DVD images in memory. Well that does not work so well since the raw videos were 4GB each and the DVDs were between 4 and 8 GB. So it was just constantly loading files into memory and then dumping them and loading more causing the hard drive to thrash constantly. So if you are seeing unusually high hard drive activity you can add Superfetch to the list of services to disable.
My computer needed some process cleanup anyway.

I love my Civic again

So I am finally recovering from the whole new parent thing and starting to get some things done again. One of those things was to get new tires on the car. While I was at it I figured I might as well get the rest of the maintenance I have been putting off done too. My poor Civic was new in 2002 and has over 100k miles on it. I have not done any major maintenance on it. Just oil changes, filters, brakes, and tires. The Honda Civic is an amazing bit of engineering though, even with all the neglect I was still getting 30 mpg and it ran fine. It used to get 36 mpg and there was a lot of maintenance that I have passed on, so I figured it was about time.

I had the front tires replaced and aligned, the belts replaced, the spark plugs replaced, a new battery, an oil change and a general tune up. It ended up costing about $900 with the lifetime rotation and balance package at Firestone. It took about 4 hours that Liz, Aurora and I spent wandering around Santa Ana getting errands done and having lunch. It was a pleasant day.

The belts were cracked and I new they needed to be replaced, the battery was basically dead for months (You could probably start a Civic with a AA), and the spark plugs were way over due. It cost a lot, but considering that I have not had a payment in over 3 years and it has needed very little maintenance. I can not complain.

What really makes it worth it through was driving it home. It was like a new car. I had not realized how much the performance had decreased over time. I know what you are thinking performance and Honda Civic should not be in the same post, but you can get a lot out of the manual transmission version of the Civic EX. I have driven the automatic version of the Civic and I feel bad for anyone who has one. I had to have them ship a manual from another dealer when I bought mine and they thought I was crazy, but I will never buy an automatic as long as you can still get manual transmissions. Besides far better performance in general they get way better gas mileage and its much harder to power slide in an automatic (It comes in handy sometimes).

I will probably had to replace the transmission or clutch eventually though, I have taught several people how to drive stick on it and I am not gentle on it. Maybe at 200k. Here is to the next 100k miles!

Baby Aurora has Arrived

In case anyone missed the emails, texts and facebook updates my daughter Aurora Elizabeth Sanford was born on September 23rd, 2009 at 08:21. She was 8 pounds 12 ounces and 20.5 inches long. She also looked kind of like an alien, but I won't hold that against her. She was much cuter once the slime was removed. Anyway as promised here are two photo albums of her. If other people have good pictures please send them to me so I can add them to the gallery. Thanks.

Click the galleries to get higher resolution photo's directly at Picasa Web. Oh, and since this is my geek blog, I highly recommend the Picasa photo organizer. It does not mess with where the photo's are on disk and it has really cool facial recognition built in to automatically group people into albums. Working with it made me realize a couple things. First, I know a lot of people named Chris. Second, I have a lot of pictures of people I do not remember.

The Birthing (PG-13)


Aurora and friend's at less than 1 week old

Aurora's castle

Normal people just paint the nursery pink or something for a girl, well we are not normal. We are doing the room as a castle balcony. There are mountains, forests, trees, and the ocean. We will be adding a village and pirate ship soon. As she gets older we will add the volcano and rampaging dragon.

Since this is going to be a babies room the base coat is all Olympic Zero VOC Low odor acrylic paint with an eggshell finish. The details are done in non-toxic acrylic paint form Micheal's.

Anyway instead of trying to explain it in any more detail, I will just include the Picasa slide show of the painting so far.

Baby projects: The Closet

The first baby project is done. I have remodeled the closet in the nursery. It was just your standard boring closet, but now it is a closet for the ages. Okay, it's not that great, but it is more useful than the standard layout and should last Aurora until we move or throw her out of the house.

I love building things, be it computers or anything else, but the first step of any construction project is always my favorite, demolition!

 

We were careful to save the shelf that went across the top, since I am a cheap bastard and we used it to make selves for the end of the closet.

While my dad and I worked on the demolition and the shelves, Liz and Barb worked on the shelf/drawer tower thing from Lowes.

After a little trouble and a lot of jerry rigging we got everything in. As per my usual specification you could store an elephant on the shelves and the center piece is bolted to the wall with 9 inch molly bolts, so it's not going anywhere. The clothes bars it came with are a little flimsy so I may have to replace them with galvenized pipe in case Aurora wants to do pull ups on them, but that can wait a bit.

 

Next project: Crib assembly.

Labor Class

We went and took the condensed one day labor class at Hoag today. On one hand, it is nice to know that we will be at a really great hospital with private rooms and ocean views. They have great doctors and they keep your baby with you the whole time. No running off with the baby right after she is born like they used too. They do all the tests in your room. They also keep women after the birth for two days for simple births and four days for cesarean births, which is longer than most hospitals.

On the other hand, it was scary as hell. They cover all the things that can go wrong that you have no control over: prolapsed cord, breach position, the head being too big, the placenta separating, etc.

Even if everything goes right it can be anything from a few hours of discomfort to days of agonizing pain and suffering for Liz. To be completely honest I am glad I am not the one who has to go through it, but that does not mean I want her to suffer. It kills me to see Liz suffer.

However it goes down, at the end of the process we will have a baby! That is scary in and of itself. I am sure Liz and I will be good parents, but it is still a bit freaky. We will be responsible for another human life. I will have to resist my natural urge to experiment on her.